


and it got right to my head

by scioscribe



Category: Justified
Genre: Alcohol, Friendship, Gen, Movie Reference, Scars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-29
Updated: 2012-05-29
Packaged: 2017-11-06 05:18:46
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/415138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Raylan was already slipping off his shirt when he said, “Did we get this from <i>Jaws</i>, do you think, or is it pure coincidence?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	and it got right to my head

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by "that scene from _Jaws_ " where everyone compares scars. Since our U. S. Marshals are a savvy, pop-culture friendly bunch, there are few quotes in here from the movie, too.

Raylan was already slipping off his shirt when he said, “Did we get this from _Jaws_ , do you think, or is it pure coincidence?”

“Pure drunkenness,” Tim suggested from the floor.

Art begged to differ: “I got it from _Jaws_ , and saw that it was a clever excuse to have Raylan undress.”

“Hear, hear,” Rachel said. She tried to raise her glass, but only got it about halfway up to where she’d intended. It was close enough to her mouth for another drink, though, so she took it.

“Now, I don’t recall inviting such remarks,” Raylan said. He yanked up his shirt in the back. “This is a purely medical demonstration—all scandalizing thoughts to be contained, y’all understand me?” and Rachel thought that the Southern in his voice thickened like molasses when he was drunk. And he was very drunk. They all were. He sidled over to her and said, “Right there, just above the hip.” He seemed to be inviting something, and so Rachel gently touched the scar he was indicating.

“Shark bite,” Art said dryly.

“Man goes in the cage, cage goes in the water,” Tim said.

“Got that from a man in Miami with a skinning knife,” Raylan said. “What he called it, anyway, and I can’t say as I was inclined to argue at the time, seeing as how it did divorce me of a not inconsiderable bit of skin.”

“Shark’s in the water. Our shark.”

“God, Tim, would you lay off about the sharks already? You can’t see the ocean from Lexington, whichever way you look.”

Tim snorted. “Raylan Givens,” he said, rolling the name around in his mouth. “What do you think? That you’re the only one can strip down and show off a scar or two?” He tugged his own shirt up and bared an ugly, barbed-wire twist of scar tissue that Rachel could see even from across the room. He did not invite anyone closer to examine it; just touched it himself, tracing the hooks of it with a sort of loving attention. It was a little too intimate for her to watch, almost—it felt like she was intruding. Raylan was one thing, she decided, and Tim was another, because even if she’d known Tim longer, she knew less about him. “Dated someone with an ex-boyfriend crazy as a shithouse rat, stuck me with a broken beer-bottle neck ‘cause I was better in bed than him, something like that. Thing is, my date went back to him, the violent fucking son of a bitch. Can’t believe that worked out so well.”

Rachel had noticed a long time ago that Tim’s exes, when he talked about them—which he didn’t do much—never had names, never had pronouns. She wished there was a way of telling him—some non-clumsy, non-patronizing way—that it wasn’t anything he had to hide like that.

“People are crazy,” Raylan said, that same careful occlusion of specificity, and, abruptly, Tim laughed.

“Oh, fuck it,” he said. “Hand me another beer, Raylan, and let me see that one up close.”

Raylan slouched over, beer in hand, and let Tim examine the wide and uneven scar on his back. He didn’t touch.

“Tell you one thing,” Art said. “The world’s never been short on assholes.”

“No, it has not,” Rachel said. She lifted her pant’s leg.

“Shark bite,” everyone said automatically.

“Man goes in the cage, cage goes in the water—”

“This was no boating accident!”

“I work with idiots,” she said. “Got hit by a car when I was fourteen. Just a glancing blow kind of thing, they said in the hospital, and I was lucky.”

“Who did it?” Tim said. His eyes were dark, and they reminded Rachel of carnival glass, apt to throw strange splinters of colored light all across the room. He was worth loving and, just as much, worth being fearful of, because there was as much unpredictability to him as there was to Raylan. She understood his question as an offer that she did not want to take, however drunk she was.

She shrugged. “Some rich white woman, on her way home from a martini-lunch.” She rolled the cuff down again, hiding it away. “Friends with the judge, and she paid the medical bills, so as far as everyone was concerned, I had nothing to complain about. So I didn’t complain. Didn’t stop wearing skirts when I wanted to, either.” She had always prided herself on being sensible: it was her stock in trade, being sensible, being smart, and she had known even at fourteen that it would be her way out of that town, out of her mother’s life, and here she was, all that time later, getting drunk and comparing scars with people who had just as many as she did, but had never had to be half so sensible to earn them.

Tim nodded at her, almost soberly. “You yell ‘shark,’” he said, “and we’ve got a panic on our hands on the Fourth of July.”

There was a way in which Rachel could almost make sense of that, and believe that he understood her, somehow, better than anybody else.

“You want scars,” Art said, “wait until you’re my age, and see what you’ve accumulated during a lifetime of patient service to the U. S. Marshal’s office.”

“Hell, Art, I’m sure you ain’t through with your lifetime yet.”

Art unbuttoned the cuff on the right arm of his shirt and started to wind the sleeve slowly up. “There was one time, when I was first starting out, that I got sent to your old stomping grounds in Miami, Raylan, chasing after some parolee gun-thug wannabe running semi-automatics up and down the coast. We wound up on some idiotic orange raft, trying to haul him back, but the idiot stabbed through the rubber, set us to sinking. Now, we had lifebelts, but it was a long time till morning, when someone would come and find us, and we had a guy bleeding from taking just a little flesh-wound back during the raid, so—” He worked his sleeve up to the elbow, flipped his arm around, and showed them the silvery clutch of scars.

Raylan blinked at them, big-eyed and owlish. “You’ve got to be shitting us, Art.”

“My hand to God.”

“No, it’s bullshit,” Tim said. He struggled upright, and planted his hand on Art’s arm with a suddenness that almost made Rachel reach for the sidearm she wasn’t carrying. “Maligning the name of innocent sharks like that.”

“It is what it is,” Art said. “I don’t see any point in arguing, trying to convince people that don’t want to be convinced.”

“I believe you, Art,” Rachel said.

“Suck-up,” Raylan announced.

Rachel thought, though, that her Kentucky chief having a shark bite on his arm was just as plausible as the rest of them, really, which was to say, not very. Unlikely enough that if you stopped believing in them, they’d disappear. They were all in the wrong place, or—if they were Raylan—the wrong time.

She started humming, _Show me the way to go home,_ and she dragged her feet up onto Tim’s couch and closed her eyes.


End file.
